So a few popular Linux distros decided to drop a few major packages like how red hat dropped rpm packages for libreoffice in favor for the flatpak packages.
If more distros decided to drop more packages from their main repository in favor for flatpak packages, then are there any obvious concerns? From my personal experience, flatpaks didn’t work well for me. If flatpaks become mainstream and takeover the linux distros, then I might just move to Freebsd. I just want to know if there is any positives to moving away from official repositories to universal repositories.
flatpak seems to be adopted by everybody who’s not directly affiliated with canonical. Which is only about half of the linux desktop space. Snaps are controversial, but I like them. Currently I’m on Ubuntu with 23.04 and snaps, they work really fine for me. Most of my VMs now use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with flatpaks though, and that works really nicely as well. ‘Normal’ users probably don’t care, so I’d say that both packaging formats will slowly replace everything else, but only snaps can form a complete system. Flatpaks cannot be used without apt/pacman/rpm/zypper/whatever. Edit: the main benefit of moving to universal repos is consistency. Flatpaks and snaps on ubuntu work exactly the same as snaps and flatpaks on arch, there are no version differences, no differences in dependencies.
The snap install I did of nextcloud on my server was sooooo painless compared to manually doing it or the AIO docker crap they have. It was a trivial install with snap. Upgrades have been easy peasy.
I only use ubuntu on my servers, but for this specific use case I’ve been very happy with the snap.